Exhibition

  • Everything Loose Will Land
    Sylvia Lavin
    Curator
    Yale School of Architecture Gallery
    Aug 29, 2013 to Nov 09, 2013
  • GRANTEE
    Yale University-School of Architecture
    GRANT YEAR
    2013

View of Everything Loose Will Land, Yale School of Architecture Gallery, 2013, New Haven, CT. Photo: Richard House.

Everything Loose Will Land explores the intersection between architecture and art during the 1970s. Reframing Frank Lloyd Wright's famous quip, "Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles," the exhibition demonstrates that this infamous looseness dislodged the arts from their separate habits, redefining cultural practices and their relationships to the city of Los Angeles. The exhibition is organized around three primary means by which architecture found itself in unprecedented convergences with other artistic practices: overlaps in their working PROCEDURES; the conversion of their respective viewers and clients into USERS; and in response to the collapse of utopianism, their shift away from attachments to the purity of philosophical space toward more direct engagement with the varied and fragile interrelations that yield ENVIRONMENTS. Everything Loose Will Land is organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, with a subsequent installation of the exhibition at the Graham Foundation in 2014.

Sylvia Lavin is a leading figure in contemporary architectural history, theory, and criticism. Lavin is the recipient of a 2011 Arts and Letters Award, as well as previous awards from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to her most recent book, Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011) Lavin is the author of Quatremere de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (MIT Press, 1992); Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT Press, 2005); and the forthcoming The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity (recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant). She initiated a series of architectural projects for the Hammer Museum, has been a guest curator for the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Ace Galleries. Lavin is the director of critical studies in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at University of California, Los Angeles, has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and other international schools of architecture, and is the director of Hi-C, a design/research group that supports architecture in the public realm.

Brian Butterfield has served as the director of exhibitions at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery since 2011. He has organized and/or designed: Palladio Virtuel (2012, curated by Peter Eisenman and Matt Roman); The Piranesi Variations (2012, organized by Eisenman Architects); Ceci n'est pas une reverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman (2011, curated by Emmanuel Petit); and Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture (2012, co-curated and designed with Massimo Scolari). From 2004 to 2008 Brian worked for the award-winning office of Della Valle Bernheimer Architects in Brooklyn, New York. Brian currently teaches design studios and a course on furniture design at the Yale School of Architecture.

At the Yale School of Architecture we recognize our obligation to the historic moment in which we study, teach, and build—but we also recognize that this moment, however unique, is neither singular, unchanging, nor disconnected from the past or the future. Architecture is the most palpable of all the arts and the most public, as it concerns the art of making and preserving fixed places, which serve as the settings for the interaction of people and ideas over time. Seeking to highlight architecture's continually evolving relationship to the wider world it serves, the YSOA Gallery is dedicated to advancing the understanding of architecture in the context of history and ideas—as well as contemporary practice—for both the academic community and the greater public. The Department of Architecture at Yale was established in the School of the Fine Arts in 1916 and designated its own separate professional school in 1972.